Scam of the Day AKA She Loves You Yeah, Yeah, Yeah

What a touching email. Mercy saw my profile and wants to know more about me. She even tells me “please don't forget that distance or color does not mean any thing,but love matters a lot”. What a sweet sentiment. Now I’ll show you the email and I think you’ll see what’s wrong with this picture.

To begin with, the email was sent to “undisclosed recipients”. Hardly an endearing approach. The name the email appears to come from is Celine, but the sender signs as “Mercy”. You don’t see it here, but if you hit reply to this email it doesn’t go to an att.net email address, it went to a Yahoo account that I had shut down. This is a scam I have seen for a couple of years now. If a person responds then some guy in an internet café, probably in Nigeria or close to there, will continue to pretend he is a woman and tell the story of how “her” parents were killed by rebels and “she” is in a refugee camp in Dakar Senegal (which has no refugee camps that I can find) and that there is a large sum of money in a bank account. I actually have never seen a legitimate email with the sentence “distance or color does not mean any thing, but love matters a lot” that was not a scam. If you google “distance or color does not mean any thing,but love matters a lot” you will find many spam and scam reports related to this.

Usually these scammers are using Yahoo email accounts, so if you should receive one of these, do be sure to email abuse@yahoo.com and report it.